With a growing awareness that dependency upon carbon based fuels is a worldwide factor in ecological, political, and economic instability, increasing numbers of consumers are turning their attention to alternative fuel automobile and electric vehicle technologies with additional attention being directed to reducing such dependencies with respect to other energy consuming activities in everyday life. The automotive markets are showing a shift away from fossil fuel technologies and in response to this market demand. As the consumer demand increases in a free market economy, the product supply will grow and evolve to meet the demand for green technologies.
While some green technologies completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels for propulsive power, such as totally electric cars, other technologies attempt to improve the energy efficiency of fossil fueled vehicles through the use of hybrid and other technologies. The burning of fossil fuels in vehicles such as in internal combustion engines has long been recognized as being relatively inefficient with a significant portion of the energy released during combustion being wasted. One method of improving energy efficiency is utilizing fossil fuel to generate electricity for powering a vehicles drive trail. In this manner, the energy of the fossil fuel can be generated at an optimum level, translated to electrical energy for storage in batteries, wherein the cyclical demands of driving are drawn from the batteries rather than cycling an internal combustion engine between efficient and inefficient modes of operation.
In other areas of everyday life, one witnesses natural motions that if harnessed can contribute to the energy demands of society. Air mass movements such as the wind can be transformed to mechanical motions to drive machines, the rising and falling of the tides or cyclical wave movement are other forms of motion with the potential to be harnessed to capture the kinetic energy expended during the movements of those phenomena. Even the cyclical movement generated by a person while breathing offers the potential for capture and transformation for use in powering implanted life sustaining medical devices.
Therefore, a technology is needed whereby everyday motion, such as linear motion or rotational motion, can be captured, harnessed, and transformed into a storable form of energy such as electrical power for later use.